September 16, 2005

Many on the Left have claimed that the federal response to the hurricane in New Orleans was slower or smaller because of all the troops in Iraq. The argument seems to be that if the troops weren’t in Iraq, they could have gone to New Orleans.

But for one very prominent Leftist, sending them to New Orleans wouldn’t be good enough anyway!

George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration, pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq, and excuse his self [sic] from power. The only way America will become more secure is if we have a new administration that cares about Americans even if they don’t fall into the top two percent of the wealthiest.

Matt Drudge points out that Sheehan is “fresh off inking a lucrative deal with Speaker’s Bureau.” So perhaps “she self” will soon be among “the top two percent of the wealthiest” (does that mean “the top two percent of the wealthy people” or “the wealthiest two percent of all people”? Those are very different things. Unless there is some “leftist math” that’s different from regular math.)

The Left has been all over the place for the last two weeks with the allegation that FEMA didn’t respond quickly enough to the hurricane in New Orleans because the city’s population is two-thirds Black, and it was all about racism or poorism or some other “-ism.” There may be some truth to that allegation, but it’s not what the Left wants you to think.

While people were clinging to rooftops waiting to be rescued, 700 firefirghters from around the country went to New Orleans — and were forced to take “an eight-hour course on sexual harassment and equal opportunity employment procedures.”

That’s the message from Gary Hershorn, a picture editor for Reuters, about the photo yesterday that shows President George W. Bush writing an all-too-human note during a UN meeting.
…
The photo, which quickly became fodder for blogs and e-mails among friends, was taken by Rick Wilking, a contract photographer based in Denver who recently covered the flooding in New Orleans.

Hershorn, Reuters’ news editor for pictures for the Americas, says he’s responsible for zooming in on the note and deciding to transmit the photo to Reuters clients. He says Wilking didn’t know what the note said when he shot the picture.

“I’m so adamant that Rick has nothing to do with this. He was just the guy who pushed the button,” Hershorn says.

In response to the attention the photo is getting, Reuters’ spokeswoman in London released a two-sentence statement about the picture: “The photographer and editors on this story were looking for other angles in their coverage of this event, something that went beyond the stock pictures of talking heads that these kind of forums usually offer. This picture certainly does that.”
…
[H]e started to wonder about a note that Bush was seen writing in three of the pictures. Out of curiosity, he zoomed in to see if he could read it.

Once he saw what it said, Hershorn decided the note was interesting and worth publishing. The white parts of the picture were overexposed, so a Reuters processor used Photoshop to burn down the note. This is a standard practice for news photos, Hershorn says, and the picture was not manipulated in any other way.

Next time you read or hear in the mainstream media that the blogosphere is unrealiable or fulled with immature people unconstrained by responsible editors, just remember what you get from “professionals” in the news business, who are “constrained” by editors who consider it “standard practice” to alter photographs to get a “other angles in their coverage” and reveal to the public important information that we have the “right to know” and could not have known without the services of professional journalists: that the president goes to the bathroom.